Follow this author to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. Those who are bullish about the future of artificial intelligence imagine a day soon when consumer products are finally able to match the potential capabilities of the technology. Among the companies determining that future is Qualcomm, the semiconductor leader whose chips power many of the devices in our lives--from smartphones to automobiles.

Gowanus the media puppet probably shouldn't even be talking to me. Made of literal garbage--his origin story is that he was born in a dumpster in his namesake neighborhood in Brooklyn--he's the media representative for the Summer of Ludd, a Luddite festival that took place in New York earlier this month. The festival, which WIRED attended, included everything from workshops on how to flirt IRL to an evidence box, where people could submit testimonies on how Big Tech has negatively impacted their lives. Its rules were simple: Be present. No phones, recordings, or photographs allowed. So, philosophically speaking, it is somewhat contrary to Gowanus' beliefs to be in a podcast recording studio at Condé Nast's Manhattan offices. But he's pragmatic, telling us he wants to reach people, so he's willing to meet them where they're at. Still, he has some conditions--presented to me on a handwritten contract. Namely, that we not clip short-form video of the show, in an effort to encourage people to engage with the full interview. In a compromise, we agree to only clip Gowanus explaining the contract. You might be wondering why Summer of Ludd and its movement are represented by a puppet. It's a nod to the original Luddites, British textile workers who anonymously organized against being replaced by technology during the Industrial Revolution in the early 19th century. While the term "Luddite" has since become a derogatory way to refer to someone who opposes technology, there's a renaissance happening--and it's surprisingly being heavily embraced by Gen Z. Gowanus offers anonymity to the people behind the growing trend. I was curious about how being a modern-day Luddite works in practical terms--even organizing this interview was a challenge, because the Summer of Ludd folks weren't necessarily quick to reply to emails. And I wanted to know why the first generation to ever grow up totally online seems to be leading the charge on having less screen time.

Peter Shor's algorithm could break the internet - but he's not worried Few people have invented an algorithm with the potential to spark a worldwide crisis, so why is quantum computing pioneer Peter Shor so unconcerned? "So, he's the Beyoncé of this event?" a young woman standing behind me says to a colleague. The three of us are standing, looking at the back of a crowd, whose members are all looking at a bearded man in an orange sweater. Getting a look at him is like trying to see the - only fleeting glimpses are possible. "His algorithm is the algorithm that will break everything," the colleague says, as I briefly catch sight of people posing for selfies and getting their conference badges signed.

Erling Haaland Is Everywhere at the World Cup. He's become an internet character perpetuated by fans and AI. Last week, somewhere amid the World Cup frenzy, a now-viral video circulated of Norwegian striker Erling Haaland mid-mouthful in a restaurant, glancing left and flinching at his own reflection. One post on X sharing the video racked up more than 31 million views in mere days. Fact checkers traced the footage to a slapstick skit by the Chinese comedian Jin Long, posted to TikTok in mid-June .

For our very first WIRED Book Club livestream, Kate Knibbs will be joined by the author of, Carlos Barragán. Barragán, a journalist and researcher at, flew to Lagos to embed himself with a group of young, desperate grifters. The account he brings back is a funny, sad, enraging read about how the internet can fuel heartbreak. She also leads WIRED Book Club . He was formerly a reporter at El Confidencial before receiving his MFA in nonfiction writing from Columbia University. is his first book.

Large language models (LMs) often struggle to generate diverse, human-like creative content, raising concerns about the long-term homogenization of human thought through repeated exposure to similar outputs. Yet scalable methods for evaluating LM output diversity remain limited, especially beyond narrow tasks such as random number or name generation, or beyond repeated sampling from a single model. To address this gap, we introduce INFINITY-CHAT, a largescale dataset of 26K diverse, real-world, open-ended user queries that admit a wide range of plausible answers with no single ground truth. We introduce the first comprehensive taxonomy for characterizing the full spectrum of open-ended prompts posed to LMs, comprising 6 top-level categories (e.g., creative content generation, brainstorm & ideation) that further breaks down to 17 subcategories.

In order to train, test, and evaluate nudity detection models, machine learning researchers typically rely on nude images scraped from the Internet. Our research finds that this content is collected and, in some cases, subsequently distributed by researchers without consent, leading to potential misuse and exacerbating harm against the subjects depicted. This position paper argues that the distribution of nonconsensually collected nude images by researchers perpetuates imagebased sexual abuse and that the machine learning community should stop the nonconsensual use of nude images in research. To characterize the scope and nature of this problem, we conducted a systematic review of papers published in computing venues that collect and use nude images. Our results paint a grim reality: norms around the usage of nude images are sparse, leading to a litany of problematic practices like distributing and publishing nude images with uncensored faces, and intentionally collecting and sharing abusive content. We conclude with a call-to-action for publishing venues and a vision for research in nudity detection that balances user agency with concrete research objectives.

AI is enabling a deluge of cyberattacks the likes of which we've never seen before. Late last month, I began to consider withdrawing some money from my savings account to buy gold. It's the first time I've ever thought about panic-buying. For all of the firewalls and two-factor-authentication codes, the safety of the internet is starting to falter. Hackers are gaining the upper hand over organizations around the world--hospitals, energy grids, government agencies, and, yes, banks.

'Have I been influenced, or is this actually me?' How personal taste fell out of fashion Our favourite music, clothes and books used to be markers of individuality - but the algorithm has made us all sheep. What music, films, clothes, art, books - anything, really - do you actually like? Do you find these questions more difficult to answer than you would have done 10 years ago? It has become impossible to ignore: personal taste has been seriously debased - if not completely destroyed - by technological advancement. We know the internet has radically altered the way we form our opinions and beliefs. Now we're waking up to another sobering truth: it has wrecked our capacity to form our own preferences. It used to go something like this. We experienced the outside world - including arts, culture and fashion - via a combination of community, geography, mass and specialist media, and serendipitous accidents.

Plus: Autonomous drones may have killed soldiers for the first time. Imagine tuning in to the opening kickoff of a World Cup match and seeing a player intentionally kick the ball out of bounds. You may question the logic of surrendering possession seconds into a game. If you were Jesse Davis, though, you'd know that this play could be a prime setup to score. Davis is a professor of computer science at KU Leuven in Belgium and head of its Sports Analytics Lab, which has been at the vanguard of a data awakening in soccer. Using AI and data analytics, his team has uncovered hidden tactical patterns and challenged long-held assumptions about how the game should be played.